Please Don't Go (21 page)

Zephyr:
Why am I even here?

His eyebrow furrowed and he shrugged his shoulders, airing (via written word, but still readily available for response) his discontent to the washed up writer with the hobbling manic personality. Just as easily up, just as easily down, so was the world of Charles Rattup. Zephyr’s mother often acted as such, and he could detect the unwelcome inconsistency from a mile away. Though she was clinically diagnosed as bipolar, the extremes of her plight were barely divided by the naked eye. Zephyr had always theorized, in fact, that she was nothing more than a profit center to the pharmaceutical industry.

Rattup:
To document this tragedy! To witness a master in his final days! To give a damn! That is why you are here, you insolent prick. Should I give you more reasons? Would you be better suited to building a biographical account of events for a deaf-mute Duke of Windsor? Or a wishy-washy senator? Or perhaps a bramble of tumblin’ tumbleweed?

Charles slammed the pencil down on the pad, crossing his arms at his chest.

Unaffected, or so he hoped to display to his blustery elder, Zephyr picked up the pencil. Not only was he lashing out, but it was also becoming apparent that Rattup was quite full of himself and his writing craft. A master in his final days? It seemed so unlike him.

Zephyr:
Please don’t treat me like this. If anything, you’re pushing me away. It feels silly to say this, but please behave yourself, sir. I appreciate you and I certainly give a damn. Why else would I keep returning?

Rattup:
Because you are a sick boy that doesn’t quite know it yet. You’ve got a bug inside your head and you want to claw it free, to set it loose in the dirt and stomp it to death with your boot, but you can’t quite get there without a wise old sage, such as myself, to release that beast. You’ve got the will, but not yet the tools. You are a free thinking man, a player of words, but you cannot find the strength and focus to trigger those words. I am here to motivate you. You are here to absorb my meanderings and accept that I am still just a sack of corroded bones when the sun goes down on us.

A smile released itself, quite begrudgingly, from between Rattup’s lips. Another crack sounded off its genesis from above and Zephyr tried to peek over the underside of the unfurled umbrella surreptitiously.

Zephyr:
So, Emily?

Rattup spoke up loudly, so unexpected in the snappy delivery and putrid words that Zephyr’s jaw dropped free of its clenched position, “Emily was a little cunt and I’m glad to have never seen her ugly little demon’s face again. May she rot in hell.” A chilly tornado swooned in Zephyr’s ear.

“
So is she...?” Zephyr asked, his voice trailing off as he looked about him, trying to find a proper mime to explain her ever-prominent-presence with his eyes. Not only was he speaking of her aloud (a prime violation), but he could feel her on his back, watching them.

“
A cunt,” Rattup repeated, Zephyr hardly able to fathom such a well-spoken man of dignified scholastic history using such an obtrusive word, and a second time at that. “Have you ever heard of transference?”

“
Yes, but of what?”

“
Demons.”

The panes of greenhouse above them shattered, simultaneously, in a grand symphony of unraveling destruction. Shards of glass rained upon them, bouncing off the canvas of the umbrella with joyful sprays. It sounded to Zephyr as though the Jolly Green Giant had tripped over his shoelace and landed on top of the house, bludgeoning the structure into a state of folding in upon itself. When the glass finished its gravitational death march, he poked his head around the umbrella once again, observing more than twenty panes of glass now missing, the occasional piece left untouched like a child in the process of losing their baby teeth in favor of adult ones. He glanced at the ground all around them, riddled with crystalline glimmering glass. The bright early spring sun was refracting from the disaster in every direction, spilling a rainbow of colors on to Rattup’s plain white shirt. He was grinning from ear to ear, and something in Zephyr informed his better judgment that Rattup had spoken out against the invisible house guest on purpose, to invoke a warning shot of fury.

He was outright provoking the thing, and Zephyr did not like it one bit. He was a puppet fighting back against his master, a slave revolt in the making. “Are you satisifed?” he asked Zephyr with dazzling, energized eyes. “Can we quit with the grim matters of my cloistered existence and watch the film of the day? The one about grown men fist-fighting each other in some sort of nihilistic Boy’s Club, as you so describe it? Because that sounds mildly amusing.” He smiled, brushing a bit of glass from his shoulder.

Zephyr nodded, afraid to move from his chair.

***

They took in
Fight Club
, a favorite of Zephyr’s, though for the first time since his first viewing, he was unable to focus upon the film. At certain parts he would mouth the lines of Tyler Durden, but never took his eyes away from the elder Rattup. Since their transition indoors, the bizarre man acted as though nothing had happened in the greenhouse, that the roof quite literally collapsing upon their heads was as standard an event as the taking out of trash. He had walked into his house in silence, brushing some splinters of glass from his shoulder, seemingly unaffected by the destruction of his beloved greenhouse, which troubled Zephyr more so than this second witnessed unnatural explosion of glass. The soil in the greenhouse was surely damaged by the intrusion of glass shards, but even that had no palpable or visible effect upon the man. He simply wanted to watch a movie and forget about it all, as one would drink a bottle of whiskey in favor of attending a lover’s funeral.

“
This film is strange. It makes me uneasy. Is this really what Americans value? Nothingness? In my day, a man or boy may have been called a Communist for such sour behavior,” commented Rattup, furrowing his brow at the concept of the film. “At the same time, I enjoy it. There is liberation in all this gloom, is there not?”

No
, thought Zephyr. He realized, soon after that thought, that Rattup was actually speaking on the subject of Fincher’s
Fight Club
. “It’s saying that we’re trapped. All of us are trapped by the prisons we make for ourselves. In the cars we drive, the clothes we wear, the words we use. In the end, all we’ve got is our life and what we do with it,” Zephyr replied.

“
On a long enough time-line, everyone’s survival rate drops to zero
,” Rattup regurgitated a line that he had stashed away in the back of his spongy mind. “I enjoyed that. So very true,” said Rattup, rubbing his chin thoughtfully.

“
It is.”

Zephyr felt a tactical discomfort in the gaze that Rattup then situated upon him, The Pixies blaring in the background of the closing credits, asking of the viewers, “Where is my mind?” The old man’s aura had blistered, or so Jackie may have said about him (
blistered
was her favorite word of disappointment), were she allowed to ever be in his calamitous presence. Zephyr now thanked an unknown deity for that avoided state of affairs, that Jackie was best to keep herself distant from the delirious man.

The seasoned writer seemed to have a particular hang-up upon the notion illustrated in his previous quotation about man’s inevitable survival rate. “Everybody dies, young man. We all feel the stinging grip of an invisible hand, wringing our necks as burly bells toll on the shores of Heaven or Hell. We cannot escape that cataclysmic eventuality. Escape is not an option,” he said, his eyes filling with a blankness that was fit for a lobotomized mental patient. Zephyr could feel
her
in the room as well, looming about them both, studying the words of Charles Rattup, conveying a blackened nod of agreement to his downtrodden prophecies of reckoning. “Escape was never an option, kid. You best believe that.” It seemed, Zephyr thought, that Rattup was speaking on his own life.

Standing from his chair, Zephyr approached the DVD player, ejecting his movie and slapping it into its jewel case, avoiding the reaffirmed laser beam stare of Rattup. “I really need to get a move on. You’re just a bit over the top today. You’re all over the barometer,
man
. I can’t read you for shit, to be perfectly blunt.”

“
Read
me? What do you mean by that,
man
?” Rattup shot back, recapitulating the tone and delivery of Zephyr’s hippie slang, which now caused great embarrassment in his attacked speech.

“
Yes,
read you
. You’re hot and cold. I recommended it before and this is my last time, but you need serious help. And I’m not sure I’m the best guy for that job. I’m not Sigmund Freud, and I’m certainly not a Ghostbuster, either,” he said, looking up to the rafters, hoping that if
she
was floating up there that his random glare had fallen upon her, if only to unnerve her eavesdropping tendencies a bit. It was a genuine fake-out, but the gesture made him feel potent, all the same. “This is just too much for me.” Zephyr found that he was no longer frightened by Rattup and his home, not so much as
irritated
by its imposition upon his previously mundane life. Sure, Rattup had nasty physical marks to indicate a belligerent brand of abuse, and the Exploding Glass Fiasco (part one and part two) was a dangerous affair, but it was still just a show. Theatrics. Self-inflicted wounds. Crafty wizardry with a touch of scientific reasoning. Glass is breakable, and with a sharpened knowledge of science it can be done so in outrageous ways.

Zephyr was positive of this.

Perhaps.

Perhaps he was not so sure.

He had started to wonder, as he had at the very beginning, if Charles was simply toying with him out of boredom- an old man, beyond retirement age, stretching into the final long haul of life, no longer amused by the day to day tasks and pleasures.
Watching me squirm
, thought Zephyr.

“
Until next week?” Zephyr posed, unsure if he would actually return to the man’s strange abode, as had always been the question whenever he left. The danger therein was more than the benefits he reaped from their friendship.

“
Yes. Next week,” Rattup replied, pondering to himself what a Ghostbuster was.

***

“
He’s losing his mind. That is, if he hasn’t already lost it altogether.”

“
You’re just figuring that out now?” Jackie asked with an unmistakable tone of
ha-ha-I-told-you-so
oozing from her words. Closing the lid of her laptop, she placed it on the coffee table, redirecting her full attention to her befuddled boyfriend. “This guy has a one-way ticket to a padded room. I told you so. The ghost stuff aside, he’s a few cards short of a full deck. Shall I continue with the trite metaphors?”

“
Don’t bother, I’ve already thought of them all. And I can’t argue in favor of him anymore, no matter what I see in him. He’s out of his fucking mind.”

“
Language,” she scolded him playfully, touching his hand. The coarse hostility that she had displayed during his ill-fated marriage proposal was altogether missing from her current spirit. Zephyr was happy for such, that he could bicker and gripe of his Rattup situation without fear of being snapped at for clandestine reasons out of his control. He had already chalked that night up to her monthly blood, and they had successfully moved on with their lives. In fact, a teeming passion was filling Jackie, as though reinvigorated by life. Her manic swing had gone from downtrodden and defeated (as with that evening at the Chinese restaurant) to boisterous and triumphant. He had never known her to take pills, but wondered if something prescription-related was going on behind his back.

Jackie reached towards their coffee table, pulling a small dish of black mission figs into her lap. She bit into one, separating the wrinkled fruit blossom from its hardened stem. Her face wrinkled at the taste, for they had gone past their proper expiration date, dried and rigid. “Fig?” she asked, chewing. Zephyr shook his head. He hated the seedy little sacks. When he looked at them now, he considered the narrator’s (Rattup’s?) breakfast plate at the end of the story, and whether black mission figs, Jackie’s all-time favorite snack, would fit in alongside the rotten tomatoes, wharf rat, and uncooked chicken livers.

He shrugged his shoulders, “It’s like he’s being manipulated by his situation. I hate to say by what. All I know is that something broke the glass in the greenhouse like a goddamned sledgehammer. An environment like that has to wear on a guy after awhile, wouldn’t you say? My nerves would be so shot, being around that day in and day out, I probably couldn’t even speak.”

“
It’s all parlor tricks. Homemade magic. You’ll just have to see that.”

“
I keep thinking that
.
Then I talk myself out of it. Then I think it again, and back and forth. If they’re tricks, then they’re phenomenal, and intricate as all hell. Like David Copperfield. He’s got a pretty good poker face for it, as well, but I can’t picture him pulling rabbits out of his hat. He’s too...” Zephyr said, pausing to consider his next word, “Worn?”